Torosaurus (Collecta)

I know I’ve said it before, but Collecta really have upped their game this year, spurred on by what seems like a genuine urge to please us geeks. It’s much appreciated, as it’d be easy for a company to not give a stuff about accuracy/aesthetics as long as the products were selling (they ARE toys, after all). This mature TriceratopsTorosaurus is another pretty decent (although not perfect) figure, enhanced greatly by a very lovely paint job.

Our ceratopsian friend is posed mid-stride with its mouth open – an active but still fairly neutral pose, making it good for both display and play (if you’re buying these things for your kids. As if). Overall, the body is pretty nicely proportioned; of particular note is the relatively short tail, which is often made too long in chasmosaurine models (especially Triceratops, although obviously that’s the most common anyway). The legs are about the right length, too, although the pelvis doesn’t appear to be large enough, giving the animal rather skinny thighs – the Favorite resin Triceratops shows how it should be done. The feet are wrong, too, but then ceratopsian feet are hardly ever sculpted correctly – although it possesses the correct number of separated digits, they are all uniform lengths and all (on the hands) have claws, which is inaccurate. Still, not bad for a cheap figure.

The most striking feature of this figure – just as in the real animal – is of course the head. This is helped in no small measure by a stunning colour scheme, which really is worthy of praise. Too often the frills on model ceratopsians seem like a missed opportunity, painted in the same bland green or brown that covers the rest of the body. Papo took a step in the right direction with their Styracosaurus, but Collecta are really ahead of the pack in giving their Torosaurus such a wonderfully vibrant noggin. It really means that, in spite of its fairly small size, this figure stands out a mile when on display among its ceratopsian bretheren. It’s very neatly painted too, and for once the tiny brown eyes haven’t been given those godawful slit pupils that have become a bit of a Collecta trademark.

Unfortunately the head is, again, not quite perfect anatomically. It seems that the sculptor succumbed to the desire to give the animal a very neat, rounded frill, which sadly doesn’t quite match up to how it looked in reality. There’s a distinct lack of epoccipitals, too, although these would be very small at this scale, and the brow horns seem just a tad too long. Most troubling aesthetically is the odd position of the beak, which reminds me of Droopy Dog. You know what? That makes me mad…

Still, this is all rather nitpicky stuff (hey, it’s what we do best here at the Dinosaur Toy Blog), and this is a figure I’m very happy to have received as a graduation gift. It’s a pretty decent Torosaurus greatly enhanced by an absolute stunner of a bizarrely enormous skull outgrowth. For the cheap price it can be picked up for, it’s worth a punt.